Iain Martin is a political commentator, and a former editor of The Scotsman and former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy, published by Simon & Schuster.. As well as this blog, he writes a column for The Sunday Telegraph. You can read more about Iain by visiting his website

Cameron will try to use Hunt as a human shield

Soon I will tell the story of the night Jeremy Hunt hid behind a tree ahead of a dinner with James Murdoch. It sounds odd, but I saw it happen. Anyway, that is the least of the Culture Secretary's problems.

The "clever" thing to say nowadays whenever there is a big story which involves the media and politics is that voters are jaded and cynical. Nobody is watching anyway. So it is all, yawn, of almost no consequence. But sometimes a story comes along that is so significant that you just have to say: stuff that.

The Government is already struggling to counter the perception that it is out of touch; it really doesn't need sleaze added to the charge sheet.

The latest session at Leveson with James Murdoch was absolutely riveting and drops Hunt right in it. The stream of emails, brilliantly handled by Robert Jay QC, counsel for the inquiry, contrasted rather sharply with previous claims that the Culture Secretary was completely impartial. The texts and emails show Hunt and his team in incredibly close contact with James Murdoch and his advisers when the highly-sensitive bid BSkyB was live. Here's what David Cameron said in May 2011: "Jeremy Hunt had a quasi-judicial role to carry out, which he carried out in my view entirely properly." Does that hold now?

Labour is calling for Hunt to resign. Number 10 is putting out an odd line that it has confidence in Hunt, but seemingly not in the way in which he and his department handled the BSkyB bid. That amounts to saying: "he's a nice bloke". But Number 10 will be desperate to hold on to the Culture Secretary, hoping to use him as a human shield. If he goes the main focus of the scandal will shift closer to the Prime Minister. Before the emergence of the sensational emails, there had already been the revelation in evidence at Leveson that, according to James Murdoch, he and David Cameron did discuss the BSkyB bid when they infamously met for Christmas dinner at Rebekah Brooks's house in the Cotswolds.